Relative Distance: Kinship, Migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom

by Leslie Fesenmyer

Overview

The socio-economic and political uncertainties of Kenya in the 1990s jeopardised what many saw as the promises of modernity. An increasing number of Kenyans migrated, many to Britain, a country that felt familiar from Kenyan history. Based on extensive fieldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer's work provides a rich, historically nuanced study of the kinship dilemmas that underlie transnational migration and explores the dynamic relationship between those who migrate and those who stay behind. Challenging a focus on changing modes of economic production, 'push-pull' factors, and globalisation as drivers of familial change, she analyses everyday trans-national family life. Relative Distance shows how quotidian interactions, exchanges, and practices transform kinship on a local and global scale. Through the prism of intergenerational care, Fesenmyer reveals that the question of who is responsible for whom is not only a familial matter but is at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009335089
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/29/2025
Series:	The International African Library , #71
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Leslie Fesenmyer is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is currently leading a project on multi-religious encounters in urban Kenya funded by the European Research Council. Her research has been published in leading journals, including City & Society, Journal of Religion in Africa, and Social Anthropology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Securing the future: family, livelihoods, and mobility; 2. Aspirations, obligations, and imagination in family migration; 3. The making of 'migrants'; 4. Kinship dilemmas: negotiating relatedness across space; 5. Weddings as transnational household rituals: marriage and other intimate relations; 6. Change and continuity: the social reproduction of families between Kenya and the United Kingdom; 7. Conclusion; References.

Editorial Reviews

‘This book draws the reader into the lives of family members who, over decades, share an existence across geographical distance. Against the backdrop of wider social transformations, an extremely rich ethnography is explored with the support of a complex framework based on thorough insights into the essence of anthropology and migration studies. This is the anthropology of migration at its best.' Lisa Åkesson, University of Gothenburg

‘In all the scholarship on transnational kinship, Relative Distance is unique in focusing on the moral obligations and moral economies generated by migration. It reveals how the affective and the material are inextricably entangled, highlighting the tensions as well as intimacies generated by moral claims.' Cati Coe, Carleton University

‘The ties binding migrants to their homelands are often narrowly measured by economic remittances. In this powerful ethnographic study of Kenyans in the UK, Leslie Fesenmyer focuses instead on the dynamics of transnational families. She vividly and compellingly shows how reciprocity, mutuality and honour are embedded in obligations based on kinship and religion.' Robin Cohen, University of Oxford

From the Publisher